—–Original Message—–
>From: “Clayton E. Cramer”
>Sent: Apr 24, 2007 10:37 PM
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: read Harcourt’s paper in more detail
>
>http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/2007_04_22_archive.html#7517410094909365856
>
>Bernard E. Harcourt’s “From the Asylum to the Prison”
>
>I’ve just finished reading this paper from Texas Law Review 84:1751-86
>[2006]. I am not in a position to analyze his statistical work, but he
>makes an argument that I find quite persuasive, because of the book that
>I am currently writing about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally
>ill. Harcourt’s primary claim is that social scientists need to look at
>both prisons and mental hospitals in understanding the incarceration
>revolution–that a great many of the failures to adequately predict
>crime rate changes go away if you look at both categories of
>incarceration–not just prisons.
>
>A secondary claim is that if you combine national prison and mental
>hospital incarceration rates for the period 1928-2000, there is a very
>strong negative correlation to homicide rates: -0.78, and that this
>strong negative correlation survives when you factor in unemployment and
>demographic changes. This should not be any big surprise; about 7% to
>16% of current prison inmates are mentally ill. A fair number of people
>that might, in 1950, been locked up in a mental hospital, now wander the
>streets until they commit some fairly serious crime. In a few cases that
>make headlines, they commit mass murder, and follow it up with suicide.
>The current levels of prison incarceration, while high by the standards
>of the 20th century, when examined in conjunction with mental hospital
>lockups, just barely reaching the levels common in the 1930s through the
>1950s.
>
>One substantial difference that Harcourt doesn’t address–and which
>might influence the apparent causal connection on this–is that a
>surprisingly large percentage of pre-1960 mental hospital populations
>were syphilitic insane and elderly senile. Syphilitic insanity largely
>faded away with the introduction of penicillin after World War II, and
>the elderly senile, who contributed to that large mental hospitalization
>rate, transferred over to a variety of private nursing care facilities
>as a result of the Medicare program in the early 1960s.
>
>Labels: deinstitutionalization

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